Don’t lecture, inform!

When the world food organisation FAO reported in late November that global hunger had increased again in the 1990s, the globalisation critics at Attac were quick to name the culprits: the “unholy triad” of the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The causes of hunger are complex but the PR team at Attac Germany were not interested in details. Land reform, interest-free loans and free education for rural populations – the FAO can make all the proposals it likes to combat hunger: all Greek to these neoliberal institutions, says Attac. Economical use of natural resources? Good idea if it weren’t for the “extraction loans” of the World Bank. Infrastructure development in rural areas? Won’t work because the WTO wants the fields reserved for private enterprise which is not interested in the rural poor. And so on and so forth.

This example is symptomatic of press campaigns and PR work of many civil society organisations advocating development issues. The volume of press releases issued by advocacy organisations has increased enormously in recent years. Attac Germany now publishes statements almost daily. The globalisation critics seem to have something to say about virtually every public issue. But this has its price.

Firstly, mistakes are mounting. Careless slips like refering to the former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz as the bank’s ex-president in an Attac statement on this year’s World Social Forum are fairly harmless errors. More serious are blunders like a false claim made by the German Protestant Church development service EED and the Catholic aid service Misereor. They stated that the German development ministry has to spend ten million euros this year to cover military expenses relating to the Bundeswehr mission in Kunduz in Afghanistan.

Secondly, the picture of the world painted by many NGOs’ PR work is remarkably simplistic. The shallowness of Attac’s interpretation of the FAO hunger figures is not an isolated case. It was a welcome exception that Deutsche Welthungerhilfe/German Agro Action failed to echo the majority of civil society groups cheering the collapse of the world trade round in Cancún but also pointed to the risks the talks’ failure meant for the developing countries. As if they didn’t trust their own arguments, NGOs in their press statements tend to underline their world view by means of style making indignation unmistakable clear. What the “unholy triad” and their ilk do or don’t do is generally not just “unacceptable” but “totally unacceptable”, of course it is a cause of “profound disappointment”, and hunger figures are not just an “alarm signal” but a “deafening alarm signal”. In the long run, though, this just sounds pushy.

In terms of smugness, self-righteousness and bias, some advocacy organisations are now spitting images of the state and business institutions they criticise. Which is not a mistake but a consequence of the NGOs’ success: organised civil society long ago became a player on the political stage – at national and international level. The down side of this success is the pressure to maintain a constant public presence. The answer: clear simple messages, emotive language, soundbites – argumentation theorists call this hot rhetoric. Content suffers.

But it need not. The façade of this superficial public appearance hides vital expertise for development policy. Michael Hofmann, head of one of the German development ministry’s directorates-general, said in the January issue of D+C that NGOs in Germany had assumed the important role of think tanks; they not only demanded concepts but also presented them. On the whole, civil society organisations fulfil this role adequately; they certainly have the requisite human resources. So it is all the more regrettable that the press work done by many NGOs gives the impression that their aim is to lecture rather than to inform.